Daybreak

Winter 2025 Issue 3

SHELBY EDWARDS

My neighbor, door open, pauses to first carefully knot the
maple yellow scarf, the one that suits her silver hair and gray
eyes. Not gray exactly, but that color of blackwater lit just at
the surface with a full autumn’s sun, all quicksilver and fish.
Then it’s her good blue coat and stiff orange boots and, finally,
she heads off down the path from the shell of her little white house,
out the long spit to the end, until she is standing, still as a slack
tide, water over the toes of her boots, chest full of mist and salt.
Small as a heron, she stands among the islands, waiting
for the first light, and as it breaks, throws her arms wide, wide,
and calls good morning

SHELBY EDWARDS is an emerging poet and non-fiction writer who lives on the edge of a very green island in northern Washington with two good dogs. She is a Hedgebrook alum, holds an MFA from the Oregon State University, spent over twenty years in the Army, and has most recently been published in the Sky Island Journal and the poetry anthology, So Long: The Anthology of Poet Warriors from Dead Reckoning Press.

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